Turn your Gutter into a Garden Sprinkler!

When we moved into our house 6 years ago, the gutter in the front of the house spewed into the yard, and where the water ran nothing would grow. To fix this problem, we decided to install an underground pipe system that had a sprinkler-type release on the end to keep the water in the garden. This worked well for awhile, but recently had become clogged. Because our house was built over 100 years ago, we don’t have a traditional shingle roof and gutter system on our front porch. Our gutter is simply a hole in the porch roof which the water, and any other debris on the roof flows into. Unfortunately, we haven’t found a good way to keep mud, leaves, and anything else out of the gutter, thus the recent clogging. To make matters worse, the underground pipe needed to be unclogged, so we decided it would be best to remove it permanently. After digging up the buried pipe and cleaning out the gutter, we decided to re-purpose it into an above ground rain gutter watering system. We liked that the water was redirected into the garden, so we thought we’d try adapting our formerly underground system to an above ground gutter sprinkler.

After de-clogging it, we drilled a series of holes into the pipe for our rain gutter watering system. The holes are a few inches apart, and arranged into two rows.

After the holes were drilled, the pipe is reattached to the gutter. To raise it up a bit and ensure that the water drains into the pipe, a granite paver was placed underneath of the elbow.

Now we wait for rain.

It looks like our rain gutter watering system works well! Having the pipe above ground will make it much easier to clean out if it clogs up again. And, the rainwater is redirected into the garden and distributed amongst several plants. No if we could only come up with a way to keep the gutter clear!

Have you considered installing a rain gutter watering system? Give this project a try! Interested in installing a rain barrel? Check out my post: installing a rain barrel.